The result is a string band cabaret that is folksy, honest and, at times, brutally beautiful. Based in Chicago, please welcome The Crooked Mouth.

Notes on The CROOKed MOUTH.
ME: I am at my most joyful on stage, in a band, singin raw or sweet. When I started to work with Matt and Troy in the CROOKED MOUTH STRING BAND, I felt this huge bear lift up inside me. I had had 5 or 6 bands before CROOKED MOUTH, but it had been several years since anything had gone from the maybe stage. With Troy and Matt we would often play without talkin, moving from song to song that I mostly already knew how to sing—Troy and Matt choosing their instruments, playing off of each other with a look of bad garlic in the mouth or the yes face. We started to add new stuff, Matt songs, stuff i was writing. Jenny, my longtime cohort in MAESTRO SUBGUM & THE WHOLE, heard us and declared that we needed a drummer and agreed to sit in. She never left, bringing with her a passel of new songs. Troy wrote a pile of new stuff. Our friend Vicki decided she would join us, and as we already knew that things go better with Vicki, she was in. Somewhere along the way, we lost the string band part and recorded a pile of songs. Here’s the first bunch. Some of them I started singing thirty years ago, some Lena wrote when she was seven.Tears Of Women was recorded before, in a duo that I had with Mr. Greenberg. Deathrag was on the last MAESTRO album. -- Beau O’rEilly

From Barrie Cole, playwright:
"Okay, The Crooked Mouth is just...I mean...Really, there is just no other band like The Crooked Mouth. The only other bands anything like The Crooked mouth are with people who are already in the Crooked Mouth or existed with people in The Crooked Mouth before there was a Crooked Mouth. What a mouth is this Crooked Mouth. Yes. The truth is, this Crooked mouth is probably crooked not for lack of orthodontia or criminal activity, but is probably that way from stretching so far in the singing of songs. What other band has songs about belonging and not showing up, the heartbreak of professionalism, and having interesting middle-age problems? Furthermore, there are stories in between about enunciation and Bruce Willis, not to mention dynamic air-cane playing, acoustic guitar played in an insane electric way among other silky, stringed things and drums to piano and back and forth and back again with a percussion in the percussion of percussion."

Discography

Third release by Chicago's The Crooked Mouth.
Sharp, confident and rollicking. LoveloveloveloveSTOPlovelovelove shows off the band's new line-up to good effect. The songs are focused, intelligent and funny. The musicianship tasteful and just slightly off-kilter. The arrangements show off a playfulness that only comes with the confidence gained from hundreds and hundreds of gigs. As always,... [read more]

Yes Face picks up where their debut ended. A little less country, perhaps.. First, though, the recording is lovely. Simple, complex, beautiful... It breathes. Deeply. As expected, the vocal arrangements are well conceived and executed flawlessly by people with an obvious passion for such perfections. The instrumentation is tasteful - bringing banjo and bluegrass sounds to folky show tune-y (... [read more]

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